


Don't Weigh Me Down

by stephanericher



Category: Kuroko no Basuke | Kuroko's Basketball
Genre: KNBxNBA, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-10
Updated: 2018-12-10
Packaged: 2019-09-15 21:17:13
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,494
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16940889
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stephanericher/pseuds/stephanericher
Summary: Tatsuya had shuddered, gulping down a two-days-open bottle of red Gatorade, and in the dusty light from behind the window screens, illuminating the sweat and grime clinging to his skin, Taiga had thought he’d never looked better.





	Don't Weigh Me Down

The weight of the two large fountain sodas drags the plastic bag downward, digging its handles into Taiga’s wrist. He’d adjust the sleeves on his hoodie, but his hands are currently curled around the large, greasy paper bag in his pocket and he doesn’t want to lose that warmth.

It’s not that it’s too cold out, but walking down the hill with the wind blasting into his face isn’t exactly comfortable. And he doesn’t have too much farther to go before he reaches the park, and the basketball courts, and Tatsuya. The wind whistles through the nearly-bare tree branches; Taiga sets his shoulders forward. His hood slips off his head.

He’s survived several winters in Chicago; this should be nothing, but it’s an awfully strong contrast from yesterday’s sixty and drizzling, harsh cold sun disappearing later into clouds, though still not too cold for outdoor basketball. (Though Tatsuya would probably play outdoor basketball at negative twenty if he could get away with it and find someone to play against him.) At the bottom of the hill, Taiga crosses the street and walks over toward the park, the basketball court visible through the sparse trees.

Tatsuya is just as Taiga had left him, shooting free throws, sleeves rolled up to the elbows. The ball falls through the netless hoop and bounces back toward him; Tatsuya picks it up and resets himself. Bends his knees, dribbles once or twice on automatic. This time, the arc looks slightly skewed from before and the ball clangs off the rim but bounces back in. Taiga can only see the twitch of Tatsuya’s mouth, but he can hear the small swear that escapes without being close enough for the sound to travel to his ears. Taiga clears his throat.

Tatsuya pivots, the ball he’d just picked up wobbling in his hand, as if poised to throw it like a dodgeball, straight at Taiga’s head. The tension falls out of his shoulders almost immediately, though; he dribbles the ball lazily as he walks over to meet Taiga, too superstitious or too proud to travel even when there’s no ref or game clock, no game at all except the one he’s constantly playing in his head against himself.

"Did you get any food, or just drinks?"

Taiga pulls one hand out of his hoodie pocket, grasping the Wendy's bag as if it were a  basketball. The grease is soaking his fingers and the food is definitely a little squished. They both reach in at once, fingers tangling in each other's and in the still-hot fries. Tatsuya catches Taiga's eye and grins, hooking his thumb around Taiga's pinky.

Tatsuya wouldn't have done this last year. Not this specific action, because they weren't even close to being together, but all of this. It would have ended in a confrontation, Tatsuya bristling at an insinuation Taiga hadn't made, an idea just for existing, caught up in his uncertainty and self-doubt and self-sabotage. He'd have made things bad for both of them and let that keep hurting himself until his brain made him give himself a break so he could worry about losing his roster spot again.

Tatsuya is a difficult person, but it's easy to love him. Taiga can't not. But loving him from a distance is hard, loving him when he keeps pushing away, with force and reflex and fear bundled up together like the inside of a firework, is hard, and Tatsuya knows it is. (He’d asked, last summer when Taiga had made it clear just how long he’d been wanting Tatsuya, why he hadn't given up, and the question had been both obvious and a little insulting.)

Here, now, he is less difficult, but still complicated and contradictory. There’s still an undercurrent of insecurity, from what he hasn’t shed or buried deep within him. He’s still afraid to stop pushing himself or give himself too much of a break, but the fear does not weigh on his bones until they bend like rusty, overstuffed bridges.

He wipes the grease from his hands on his shorts, and reaches into the bag on Taiga’s wrist. Taiga obliges the unspoken demand, letting one handle fall to open the bag. Tatsuya pulls out the one on the right, stabs a straw through the top, and takes a sip.

“This one’s yours.”

He offers it out to Taiga, and Taiga leans down to take a sip. Their foreheads touch.

* * *

Tatsuya had signed a (since renewed) fourteen-month lease when he’d move to New York on a seventh-floor walkup that he could afford on his signing bonus alone. Taiga had raced him up to the top when he’d helped Tatsuya move in, after they’d taken up the boxes full of Tatsuya’s crappy college appliances that he’d kept around for sentimental value (though his excuse was that replacing them is too much effort), and all his clothes. The furniture was still lying in pieces and boxes in the living room, but the sun was coming in straight down the skylight at the top of the stairs, and the coast was clear. They’d shoved each other out of the way, keeping pace the whole climb, and though Taiga had wanted to just collapse on the floor, Tatsuya wasn’t doing it so he wouldn’t either. Tatsuya had shuddered, gulping down a two-days-open bottle of red Gatorade, and in the dusty light from behind the window screens, illuminating the sweat and grime clinging to his skin, Taiga had thought he’d never looked better.

He thinks that a lot of days, though, most of the days he gets to see Tatsuya in person. New York’s not as far away from Chicago as Tatsuya could have landed, (out west, down south, both) and the Bulls come in two or three times a year. Taiga doesn’t know the city all that well (prior to Tatsuya’s draft he’d gone to a couple of hip restaurants and a brewery tour—or maybe that was in Boston) but that’s not necessary to see how well living here suits Tatsuya.

For all he complains about the traffic and the transit, the elected officials and the cost of living, Tatsuya likes it here. He’d admitted to Taiga over the summer that any place with this many street courts couldn’t be all bad, but there’s more to it than that. He likes some of the stuff he complains about, and he likes his neighborhood; he’s unselfconscious in a way Taiga never knew him to be in Akita or even in college. Back home in their old neighborhood in LA, when they were kids, but maybe not even there now. He carries himself like he knows where he’s going and what he’s doing (though, judging by the detours and byways Tatsuya uses to get to places he shows Taiga, he’s found more than one thing inadvertently by getting lost).

And there are so many things, dive bars and hangouts and delis and discount stores and street courts (but mostly street courts), so many places Tatsuya’s shown Taiga in the short bursts of time they’ve spent here together, and more on top of that that they couldn’t fit in or that Tatsuya’s keeping to himself for now. It never feels good to leave Tatsuya, but it’s more okay when he has both the world around him and the basketball world at his fingertips.

* * *

The next time they come back, the street court is almost as they left it. The asphalt is still cracked in the same places. There’s still no net on the hoop. The chain link fence still has the same un-repaired tears, and they’re still the only ones out there. The flag atop the hospital building is still at half-mast, visible if you turn your head the right way.

Of course Tatsuya likes something this constant.

Taiga opens with a two-handed dunk, but Tatsuya equalizes fast with a textbook layup after faking Taiga out with a crossover. This is stuff he’s used in games mixed with stuff he hasn’t, stuff he probably won’t use for a while. There are imperfect wobbles, scuffs on the surface of a stone that he needs to polish off, but stuff Taiga couldn’t dream of seeing last year. There’s more, too, that Tatsuya’s only begun to work on, and Taiga’s not only pushing against Tatsuya to win, to see his best, but to drag out that in a desperate move, to see what it is and what it will become.

Tatsuya’s better than he was at not taking the bait, though.

But Tatsuya wins it in the end, anyway, a mirage shot when he hasn’t used it in a game since high school and he hasn’t pulled it out in a practice or a one-on-one since nearly then. Taiga could block it, but only if he were thinking about it, and it’s the surprise that sends the ball off, silent and winking out of sight.

“Fuck,” Taiga says, wiping the sweat off his brow. “You got me.”

**Author's Note:**

> happy 12/10!
> 
> this turned into telling more than showing in some parts & i really wanna write /all/ of it (like...1.5 years starting when tatsuya was drafted) but i did not have time to do that for shipday unfortunately


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